Blue Hour Press

After a much-too-long reprieve, we are happy to unveil Blue Hour Press’ sixteenth chapbook, Rachel Mennies’ No Silence in the Fields:

A home and its broken ghosts are given voice in Rachel Mennies’ seance-like No Silence in the Fields. Its several speakers frighten and comfort, whisper and wail, with Mennies as their unflinching medium. Forging and foraging, even through vicarious anguish, for family stories chained to dilapidation, Mennies pulls memories from voluminous quiet and cold ground. In a place where death elicits no reflection or funerals, No Silence in the Fields gives both.

You can read No Silence in the Fields at nosilence.bluehourpress.com.

And—surprise—our seventeenth, Maneuvers by Christopher Deweese:

War recontextualizes everything—romance, friendship, and solitude become desperate acts and cosmic jokes, ghosts run for office and ride the rails, and permanence holds no sway, making “time capsules … a crop” and “clouds … the future.” Reading like a dead war correspondent’s gonzo journalism, the poems of Christopher Deweese’s Maneuvers relay every uncanny detail of the wasted landscape, and acknowledge that absurdity becomes the only appropriate response to carnage. Each poem, the collected debris of rallies and bomb runs and campsites, give purpose to  the poet that claims: “Inside me, there is all this dust I want to have a reason for.”

Read Maneuvers at maneuvers.bluehourpress.com.

We are ecstatic to announce our fifteenth Blue Hour Press chapbook, Fritz Ward’s Doppelgänged:

Fritz Ward’s Doppelgänged is an electrified daguerreotype of authorial impulse, a swerving tour around the haunted amusement park we call narrative. Ward’s proxies write their own misadventures, setting up their shadowy sideshows near agricultural accidents, morgues, and drive-ins. The poems in this dazzling, maximalist collection swing gracefully through the reader’s reflection, and each risky inversion of verbal acrobatics allows both the speaker and the audience to share in the pleasurable vertigo that comes from working without a net. Doppelgänged’s fun house of mirrored forgeries reveals a portrait, in multiple exposures, of the poet himself and much more.

You can read the book on Issuu, and purchase it on Lulu for $10.

Of course, the other big news is that our submissions are now open for the month of August. Guidelines can be downloaded as a Google document or found on our website.

It’s been a long (long long) time coming, but Blue Hour Press has untangled its mess of cords. We’re back, fully operational, and ready to launch some excellent chaps over the coming months.

The first will be Fritz Ward’s Doppelgänged. To whet your appetite, find poems from the series at Coconut, No Tell Motel, and Scythe.

Fritz’s book will be available, as always, for free on Issuu, and will also be available for purchase from Lulu for $10, if you like holding these things in your hands.

Thanks to the BHP faithful for keeping their fingers on our pulse, even if it appeared to flatline for a dreadfully extended period. We’re back, rest assured, and have lots of excellent work to share.

As we try to rehabilitate Blue Hour Press, we’ve come back to the comfort of Blogger. Our Facebook and Twitter pages are the best places to stay informed, so use those for timely updates. Our books…

If you’re reading this, you’ve come through some new aspect of Blue Hour Press. Perhaps it was our new Facebook page, replacing the old Group page, which will still remain active, but see less and less love. Hopefully, you have migrated from membership to like-ship with ease—thanks for doing so, if you have. For those that haven’t, the Facebook link at the bottom should send you there.

Perhaps you came to this blog (which is now on Tumblr and not Blogger, if you hadn’t noticed) through our redesigned website. If you did, splendid! We hope you like the cleaner, simple, and less Web 2.0 look. There’s more beneath the hood, now, with Facebook integration allowing you to like the press and its books and share them on your wall, Goodreads links for every book to add them to your shelf, and Tweet buttons to let you share chaps on Twitter. If you use that service, you should be following us.

If you’re keen and thorough enough, you would have also noticed that two of our books—Nick Courtright’s Elegy for the Builder’s Wife and Emily Kendal Frey’s Airport—are available for purchase through Lulu. Blue Hour Press is going to test run this, and see if there’s interest. Though the mission of the press remains to offer all of our beautiful books free of charge online, we thought some of you might prefer the handheld experience more, and we want to give you that opportunity. Each chapbook is $10.

Speaking of chapbooks, we have two new releases to celebrate all of these big changes, and they’re definitely worth trumpeting: Splice, an eerie cineastic collection by Letitia Trent, and I Am a Natural Wonder, a collaboration between Anne Cecelia Holmes and Lily Ladewig. Read the chapbooks—they’re two of our finest and favorites.

Blue Hour Press readers can expect two chapbooks a month from now until our reading period opens May 1st, which is a change that will become permanent for our release schedule. To make sure you know when more chapbooks are waiting for your reading eyes, follow this blog in your preferred RSS reader until our book-specific read is ready in the coming month, which we will announce here.

Again, we hope you enjoy the new site, the new Facebook page, and the new chapbooks. If you can believe it, another announcement is to follow in the near future that involve a brand-new internet-based literary project that we’re very excited about. Keep clicking, and give feedback if you’re so inspired in any of our various web presences.